Lethe
Captain
Oh I have a lot of time for Walt and Mearsheimer. Walt is the main reason I check in on Foreign Policy, though of course there are occasionally other good pieces too.
John Mearsheimer and Hugh White had some years back. I have a lot of time for Hugh White too, but I remain unconvinced by one of the core aspects of his thesis (at least as I understand it): White believes that the USA will ultimately yield China a sphere of influence in the Pacific because there's little reason for them not to do so, because America's fundamental security interests are not threatened by the rise of China as they were by the Soviet Union during the Cold War, because there is little prospect that China could go on to dominate Eurasia as the Soviet Union once threatened to do, because even a very powerful China will still be constrained by the presence of a series of credible second- and third-tier powers, chief amongst them Russia, India, and Japan, that are or will be considerably more powerful, relative to China, than anything the Soviets faced on the continent in the years after the Second World War. Conversely, White sees great danger (that is to say, the risk of nuclear war) in the United States continuing to hold increasingly unenforceable positions in relation to especially Taiwan.
White's contention emerges fairly straightforwardly from the realist narrative of both the British and American positions on those major conflagrations of the twentieth century, i.e. the need to prevent the emergence of a Eurasian hegemon. The question is to what extent that perspective can actually be applied to the behaviour of the United States in the 21st century. My view is that it is precisely when accounting for the internal characteristics of the United States, the collection of ideas that Americans have about themselves, their nation and its history, the ideas that I like to group under the banner of "American mythology", that the risk of catastrophic conflict emerges most clearly. Of course China has its own national mythology that shapes its behaviour in relevant ways also, but I think that American mythology, as it has calcified over the course of the 20th century and reached its apotheosis in the unipolar moment in the wake of the Cold War, is uniquely dangerous in its expansive and uncompromising hubris. My fear is that Washington may steer towards conflict even where a sober analysis of the balance of power and interests and likely consequences of certain courses of action suggest it should not, precisely because other factors also have their hands on the wheel: domestic politics, national pride and honour, the pressure to act in ways that satisfy one's image of oneself. White is , but I'm not sure how they contribute to his analysis of the U.S.A-China dynamic. I suspect that White's argument may be constrained somewhat by his status as a former insider who still addresses himself to that audience.
In the years since their debate, Mearsheimer's more muscular assertion of America's intent to preserve its primacy appears to correlate more closely to reality. I particularly recall Mearsheimer's comments about the role of American enterprise in the contest, i.e. that the attachment of American corporations to China would be broken and that the sector would swing in support of an unbounded contest with China. That has more or less panned out and seems likely to continue to do so going forward. Conversely, from the Trump administration do suggest at least the seeds of a more accommodationist perspective on China that recognises both the reality of China's power and the limits of American power and that would, if carried to meaningful fruition, more resemble White's prescription for the relationship going forward. That Taiwan is entirely absent from the new National Defense Strategy is surely a meaningful omission.
This document does engage with the idea of preventing the rise of a hegemonic power that could threaten American interests, albeit in a manner that seems broadly in alignment with the expansively conceived status quo:
The first problem here is that a considerable portion of the trade flows referred to are to and from China. It approaches that about Australia seeking to defend its trade with China, from China. But let us set that issue aside and assume that the authors merely take an expansive view of the economic potential of other nations in the "Indo-Pacific" region. That recent construct seems of dubious utility. It makes more sense for nations that straddle the two oceans, such as Australia and Indonesia, but I don't see the utility for the United States except as a means of conceptually drawing India into the picture against China, e.g. in the form of the Quad. But that's just the point: it's relatively easy to imagine future Chinese dominance of the Western Pacific. It's a lot harder to imagine future Chinese dominance of the Indian Ocean region, let alone the Persian Gulf and the Middle East, in part because the Western Pacific itself will undoubtedly continue to demand a considerable portion of Chinese energies, and because both India and the United States are well positioned to contest that more distant arena. Bearing in mind also that the majority of US trade with India and the Persian Gulf states goes via the Mediterranean and the Atlantic, not the Pacific. For those enamoured of the Indo-Pacific construct, why not go a step or two further to embrace an Afro-Eurasian-Pacific construct? Surely a region encompassing (handwaves) ~80% of the future global economy is by definition a vital American interest. Add that to Washington's enduring interest in the western hemisphere, and we can see that, indeed, there is nowhere that is not a vital American interest.
Huh. Turns out there is a 10,000 character limit on posts. Splitting accordingly.
Last edited:
